Just in case we suddenly disappear. Tumblr is actively censoring Black and Native people.
Editorial: Why aren’t dirty diesel trucks in California smog-checked? That could soon change
The benefits of going after a relatively small number of polluters are enormous. Putting in place a smog check, as required under legislation by state Sen. Connie Leyva (D-Chino) that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in 2019, would reduce more pollution than any state emissions rule since 2008 and bring enormous health benefits in the coming decades, including the prevention of more than 7,000 early deaths and thousands of emergency room visits.
In 2017, a Lancet study put the figure at almost seven million a year, about two-thirds from outside air pollution and one-third from indoor, household pollution. More recent estimates run higher, with as many as 8.7 million deaths every year attributable just to the outdoor particulate matter produced from burning fossil fuels. Add on indoor pollution, and you get an annual toll of more than ten million. That’s more than four times the official worldwide death toll from Covid last year. It’s about twenty times as many as the current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined. Put another way, air pollution kills twenty thousand on an average day, more than have died in the aftermath of all the meltdowns in the history of nuclear power: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and all the others put together. If the pandemic so terrified us that billions of us retreated into panicked cocoons for months, what can explain or justify our blindness and indifference towards the ten million lives ended each year by the repeated inhalation of smog?
Ten million deaths a year is a hundred million a decade. The numbers are so large that even the superlatives of disaster fail. They’re so large that they strain credulity, perhaps partly because none of us can picture someone dying in the street from air pollution and partly because it seems pathetically old-fashioned for a doctor to advise a sojourn in healthier air. But the chances are that you can’t picture a death from obesity or cigarette smoking either, and yet you probably don’t doubt estimates of their toll on human wellbeing, or think it wrong to call Louisiana’s River Parishes ‘Cancer Alley’ – the presence of 150 petrochemical plants has made it an incontrovertibly unhealthy place to live, with some communities registering cancer rates fifty times the national average. Such areas are sometimes known as ‘sacrifice zones’.
A single speck of black carbon, inhaled, won’t stop the heart or poison the lungs, but over time, across populations, the effect is devastating. When we talk about death we always want to see a murderer. When there isn’t one, it’s a lot harder to call it a murder, rather than a tragedy or an act of God. (‘You see one person run over in the street and you’ll never forget it,’ an environmentalist observes in Choked: The Age of Air Pollution and the Fight for a Cleaner Future.* Thousands dying from the effects of dirty air ‘will never even faze you’.) But the central premise of any mortality model is that everyone dies: the question is when, and whether a certain behaviour or environmental factor hastened that end. And while none of these estimates is meant to suggest a single cause of mortality, such as a gunshot wound or a dose of poison in your morning tea, the calculus for air pollution is the same as for obesity or smoking: take the problem away, and the number of premature deaths will fall by many millions. According to new research, half of these deaths, concentrated in the developing world, are the result of consumption and fossil-fuel burning in the world’s richest countries….
Here is just a partial list of the things, short of death rates, we know are affected by air pollution. GDP, with a 10 per cent increase in pollution reducing output by almost a full percentage point, according to an OECD report last year. Cognitive performance, with a study showing that cutting Chinese pollution to the standards required in the US would improve the average student’s ranking in verbal tests by 26 per cent and in maths by 13 per cent. In Los Angeles, after $700 air purifiers were installed in schools, student performance improved almost as much as it would if class sizes were reduced by a third. Heart disease is more common in polluted air, as are many types of cancer, and acute and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, and strokes. The incidence of Alzheimer’s can triple: in Choked, Beth Gardiner cites a study which found early markers of Alzheimer’s in 40 per cent of autopsies conducted on those in high-pollution areas and in none of those outside them. Rates of other sorts of dementia increase too, as does Parkinson’s. Air pollution has also been linked to mental illness of all kinds – with a recent paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry showing that even small increases in local pollution raise the need for treatment by a third and for hospitalisation by a fifth – and to worse memory, attention and vocabulary, as well as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Pollution has been shown to damage the development of neurons in the brain, and proximity to a coal plant can deform a baby’s DNA in the womb. It even accelerates the degeneration of the eyesight.
A high pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to result in reduced earnings and labour force participation at the age of thirty. The relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight is so strong that the introduction of the automatic toll system E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems in areas close to toll plazas (by 10.8 per cent and 11.8 per cent respectively), by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars have to queue. Extremely premature births, another study found, were 80 per cent more likely when mothers lived in areas of heavy traffic. Women breathing exhaust fumes during pregnancy gave birth to children with higher rates of paediatric leukaemia, kidney cancer, eye tumours and malignancies in the ovaries and testes. Infant death rates increased in line with pollution levels, as did heart malformations. And those breathing dirtier air in childhood exhibited significantly higher rates of self-harm in adulthood, with an increase of just five micrograms of small particulates a day associated, in 1.4 million people in Denmark, with a 42 per cent rise in violence towards oneself. Depression in teenagers quadruples; suicide becomes more common too.
Stock market returns are lower on days with higher air pollution, a study found this year. Surgical outcomes are worse. Crime goes up with increased particulate concentrations, especially violent crime: a 10 per cent reduction in pollution, researchers at Colorado State University found, could reduce the cost of crime in the US by $1.4 billion a year. When there’s more smog in the air, chess players make more mistakes, and bigger ones. Politicians speak more simplistically, and baseball umpires make more bad calls.
In 2019, a comprehensive global review by the Forum of International Respiratory Societies found that air pollution damages every organ, indeed virtually every cell, in the body. Nanoparticles of pollution have been found inside the brainstems of even the very young. But you don’t have to wait until birth to see the effects of breathing particulate matter. The impact begins in the womb, damaging the development of lungs and shortening future lives. In 2019, a small-scale study at Hasselt University found particles of black carbon in every single placenta examined, including those from mothers who lived in areas where the air was thought to be clean, with thousands of particles found in every cubic millimetre. For those who worry about microplastics in the flesh of fish, this is a yet more invasive category of intrusion. Of course, there are also microplastics in the air. They’ve been found in placentas too.
Indigenous People With Disabilities Are on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis
“The disproportionate impact of the climate crisis on disabled Indigenous communities is yet another aspect of a colonial genocide that has never ended.“
dude what the FUCK
“The pageants were pictured wearing traditional Palestinian dresses and stuffing vine leaves, claiming to be experiencing Israeli culture”
the starbucks union win isn’t without casualties though. a whistleblower was fired, which terminated her healthcare. she has cancer.
A stable sense of self is rooted in the lungs, heart and gut (Alessandro Monti, Psyche, Dec 06 2021)
“Think back to a recent episode in which you felt as if you were being true to yourself. How would you describe what you did?
Perhaps you would say that you ‘trusted your guts’ or ‘followed your heart’, rather than ‘thinking with your head’.
You might also assume that these idioms involving the guts or the heart belong to an outdated folklore – that they are a poetic rather than a scientific expression of what’s happening when we tap into our sense of self.
Yet, emerging scientific evidence increasingly suggests that being aware of who you are – being self-conscious – really does depend, not just on processes in your brain, but also on what’s happening deep in your viscera.
Consider how, right now, you could be in a very different place, mood or situation than 20 seconds or 20 years ago, yet you feel that in a fundamental sense you are the same person.
This is partly because, as William James put it in The Principles of Psychology (1890), you are aware that ‘the same old body’ is always with you, exuding warmth and intimacy.
With the exception of dreaming and altered states of mind, all conscious experiences entail this subtle but pervasive feeling of bodily self-consciousness.
But where does it come from? (…)
Indeed, a remarkable feature of visceral organs is the fact that they go through steady, predictable physiological cycles.
Heartbeats, breaths and gut contractions repeat themselves with regularity, keeping the body warm and fed – a physiological equilibrium known as homeostasis.
Moreover, each of these cycles involves peripheral nerves – especially the vagus nerve – sending chemical and electrical signals to the central nervous system.
As a result, the activity of specific regions of the central nervous system synchronises with cardiac, respiratory and gastric fluctuations.
While sensory impressions coming from the external environment vary from moment to moment and fade away, this coupling between brain and viscera is a permanent feature of your physiology.
You can close your eyes, cover your ears, hold your nose or seal your mouth, but you cannot cut yourself off from your bowels. (…)
Given that gut signals seem both to regulate food intake and to buttress one’s sense of self, poor processing of these signals could explain why individuals living with anorexia or bulimia nervosa display both abnormal eating habits and a fuzzy sense of self, sometimes morphing into self-disgust.
If gut signals are exceedingly high, they might anchor the self too heavily to what happens in their stomach and intestine.
Conversely, if they are exceedingly low, they might make the self too reliant on external feedback – or just too unstable.
The latter case could apply also to people with depersonalisation, whose feeling of being detached from their body and self might be due to the fact that their selfhood is not rooted enough in their viscera (although there is evidence both for and against this claim).
Such an impairment could be even more pronounced in Cotard’s delusion, a rare syndrome in which people feel they are ‘empty’, ‘rotting inside’, ‘without internal organs’, or even ‘non-existent’ or ‘dead’.
Smart pills tracking the activity of the gut, combined with questionnaires and manipulations of bodily self-consciousness, such as bodily illusions, could thus deepen the current knowledge of these psychological and psychiatric conditions. (…)
An important limitation of contemporary psychology and neuroscience is that scholars replaced the old Cartesian dualism – mind versus body – with a new dualism: brain versus body.
The new dichotomy was even cruder than the old one, and certainly no less rigid.
Experimenters refused to take note of whatever happened south of the neck because the scientific picture du jour dismissed what previous ages had carefully noted – the wisdom of the heart, the power of breathing, and the intelligence of the gut.”
daily reminder that ‘porn addiction’ is a myth perpetuated by far right evangelical groups.
As long as your porn consumption is not interfering with your work or social life, it’s considered normal.
Actual psychology research shows that people who identify as ‘porn addicts’ don’t actually consume more porn than average. What do they have in common? They were raised to view sex as shameful.
It’s also commonly used as a way to avoid taking responsibility. The number of men I’ve seen saying “porn MADE me misogynistic, porn MADE me dehumanize women, porn MADE me see women as objects, porn MADE me sexually harass women.”
On the flip side, I’ve also seen women blaming porn for the same reason. Instead of. You know. Misogynistic, dehumanizing abusers.
Porn is often used as the scapegoat for a lot of problems in our world, I’ve often thought it’s the equivalent of people saying video games causes mass shootings and a rise in violence.
There’s also a good bit of evidence and studies saying an availability to porn (as well as prostitution) has shown a link to decreased sexual violence.
i’m just glad these kinds of myths only exist among far right evangelicals like could you imagine how pathetic it would be if leftists thought certain kinds of porn could taint your mind making you inevitably become some sort of awful abuser? but surely nobody would believe such a thing and ostracize people for that kind of stuff while also regularly spreading around posts like this lol
very cool how the gender binary in the emerging trad terf synthesis is like, there are two genders, the one that does bad things and the one that bad things are done to. the only thing in the world is immorality and it flows from unexperiencing agents to unacting experiencers.
which naturally appeals to people who would like to be perceived as inherently lacking the capacity for immorality. for whatever reason
anyway remember bell hooks’s very cogent critique of second-wave feminist organizing in ‘sisterhood: solidarity between women’ where she argues that by “bonding as ‘victims’, white women’s liberationists were not required to assume responsibility for confronting the complexity of their own experience … Identifying as ‘victims’, they could abdicate responsibility for their role in the maintenance and perpetuation of sexism, racism, and classism.” it’s not by accident that terf gender essentialism dovetails so much with other biological-determinist & essentialist assumptions including Extremely Racist Ones
[Pedro Neves Marques:] You already mentioned science, but do you mind going back and talking a little bit more about the notion of “Indigenous science and sustainability”?
[Grace Dillon:] Nowadays, I think in terms of Indigenous sciences rather than science. I feel that’s the way we should think about all sciences, as plural, whether we label them Westernized, Indigenous, or whatever form they may take. Let me quote from Gregory A. Cajete, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo Nation who has worked in the field of Native science or sciences. He asks, “What is Indigenous science?” According to him, “It is knowing how to live in a place sustainably.” […] What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean. There’s this scene close to the end of the book, after the characters have suffered all of this environmental and extractivist injustice, where the grandmother is passing on her traditional ways of knowledge to her grandson but, since he goes to school, they’re actually teaching each other. “Intergenerational” doesn’t imply a hierarchical, top-down elders’ passing of knowledge only. It’s more of an exchange of ideas. This is what I see going on between generations in our Indigenous communities right now. In the science fiction field, my goal is to quietly change the mission for the top-notch journals in the field that are still simply clinging to stories about advanced technology and this linear way of thinking about knowledge as mere accumulation. […]
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[PNM]: In Brazil, the word that the postwar fascist regime used for clearing certain areas of the country to allow for so-called development was “pacification,” which was applied to both Native peoples and the landscape. Instead of saying that they would cut down a forested region or displace and “educate” its local Native communities, they’d call the whole process “pacification.” So that’s become an extremely loaded word in the Portuguese language. Beyond the term’s historical associations with the military fascist regime, it reinforces the colonial notion that equates Native peoples with “nature” and a violent wildness, like the threatening woods that you just mentioned. Going back to your ideas, it’s been almost a decade since your anthology Walking in the Clouds was published. And what a decade it was! We saw an intense transformation in the field of science fiction, with a wave of Indigenous, black, Asian, and many other nonwhite authors, […] being published and offering some of the decade’s most challenging stories. […] Do you find that multispecies entanglements and the inclusion of nonhuman beings has also grown in visibility, within and outside these stories? I’m asking this because, for instance, in Brazil, debates about the rights of nonhuman or other-than-human beings have been key to Indigenous […] discussions for at least the past two decades. There, the debate mostly centers around plant or animal persons, and moreover the […] question of “what is human,” from an Indigenous point of view. That is, the knowledge that terms like “animal,” “plant,” “human,” and “spirit” may mean something much broader than how modern sciences define them.
[GD:] Back in 2012, I was talking about animal persons, rock persons, phenomenological persons, plant persons, and so on, and you could sense a quiet skepticism among some people. They would see it as a form of animism, when in fact I was talking about sciences. For example, plants literally converse among each other; plants that live in toxic areas warn other plants to stay away. There are many examples of nonhuman persons in fiction about sciences. Take Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), a story about a First Nation scientist who is developing chemicals for a bioengineering company that is truly extractivist and toxic, until he sees how that’s impacting the land, together with its animal and plant persons, and he is thrown into a crisis. Does he want to be a scientist? Or at least a scientist in that kind of context?
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[PNM:] How do you see the relation between science fictions and Native myths and mythology? While the modern mind may eventually recognize the cultural value of Indigenous myths, it refuses to see them as scientific evidence. I wouldn’t want to project a meaning onto these stories, so I say this very carefully, but although in Brazil you may not find a great presence of Indigenous science fiction, Native traditions and myths almost seem to perform science-fictionally, in how they both rupture modern categories and expectations and allow for imagination beyond colonial frameworks.
[GD:] I have a lot to say about this. The first thing I’d like to do is to eradicate the term “myth” or “mythology,” because that implies that these stories are false or that they are fictions that should be questioned. Instead, what I do – and this is what I grew up with – is to call them “stories.” Everything is storytelling. Indigenous sciences are embedded in stories; this is how we share our Indigenous sciences. I grew up in an […] anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science. Our word aadizookaanan means “ceremonial stories” or “sacred stories.” Most First Nations don’t share those sacred stories with outsiders. However, in 2012 many of the nations I belong to – and you should know that we Nish peoples are often called the pacifist-anarchists among other Indigenous nations – got together and decided to share not only our gikendaasowin, meaning herbal knowledge and science and how they interact with ceremonies and songs, but also our aadizookaanan. We decided that some of our sacred stories needed to be shared globally, because they were necessary right now for dealing with Mizzu-Kummik-Quae, Mother Earth. So the reason I’m interested in science fiction is that when I was little and we had firesides, sweats, and other ceremonies, we were telling stories about star peoples that came to earth in, basically, space canoes. For me, the concept of a spaceship was not unusual. And, of course, we are all star people. We are made of stardust, which is scientifically accurate. Everything is made of stardust.
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Grace Dillon and Pedro Neves Marques. “Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms.” e-flux. September 2021.